No easy answers

The Somali pirating drama illustrates to me how there are no easy answers.

I was sent this article, "Those who forget the past are condemned"  The writer of this article did their homework and there are a lot of things that are documented from history. 

I read this article this morning,  "Suspected pirate a world away from home."

There are no easy answers. It seems to me, it is dangerous to flip to either extreme. The answer isn't to hide behind labels of jihadist pirate, or destitute victim. To lean to the attack stance ignores the tragedy of poverty that many people endure on an on-going basis, and the appeal someone could have flashing a little cash around. On the victim side, it is easy to get soft on bad people and ignore that there are truly evil people in the world intent of destroying the west.

The real danger, I think, is painting with too broad a brush. What we may cover up is the truth.

The will of Dog

Today my wife was eating a cinnamon roll. Our toy poodle stared at the pastry as if by the force of her desire she could compel the food to come her way. She stared as sections were broken off and consumed.

She did recieve bite-sized scraps to insure her digestive track didn't receive too large a shock. Once the roll was eaten, she had to be content from what she consumed.

My dog's behavior looks a lot like me. There are things I want that I may or may not get, but I stare at them none the less, hoping that my will will send my desires my way. The truth is that if I got what I wanted, if I got to eat the whole "cinnamon roll" it wouldn't make me feel any more content. In fact, it may create in me a stronger sense of discontentment, because it would remove one more thing that I believed would make me happy, and I realize after I got the prize, that I'm still not happy.

Another word about wonder

As I thought more about what I wrote in the last post, another thought crossed my mind. Jesus said that unless you accept God's kingdom with the simplicity of a child, you'll never get in. (Mark 10:13-16 The Message)

As a parent I think my favorite age of my children was 18 months. They became mobile and their consuming life task was to discover and explore. A toddler can pick up a leaf and be consumed with wonder for this amazing artifact of nature. And vicariously I am caught anew in the wonder and see the leaf through eyes of amazement.

What did I lose when I became an adult? I lost a modicum of wonder. I stopped seeing the leaf as wonder, and saw it as duty, in raking up my yard. I realized that things don't always turn out the way I think they should. I have suffered enough grief and loss to know that there is pain in the world, and that I am not exempt. The older I get the more I am tempted to make wonder irrelevant in my life. Wonder takes time and the world isn't that shining jewel I think I remember as a child. I am sorely tempted to put cynicism in its place, and in fact, many times I have.

Jesus said that if I want to get in to the kingdom, that I need to become like a child. I need to reconnect with that sense of wonder. If I can't recover wonder, then how am I going to deal with the life after this where wonder may be my primary task. 

If I let wonder atrophy then I may enter the next form of my existence crippled and completely unprepared for what awaits me.

Indication of favor

I grew up being told that the reason that we are so wealthy as a nation is because of God's blessings on us and if our culture moves away from what Evangelical Christianity declares is what God favors, that we will lose God's blessing and it will be evident by the loss of our prosperity.

Following that logic, does that mean that those poor people in Darfur really "sinned" against God and acted in such ungodly ways that God not only took away their prosperity, but he took their food away as well?

In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31, there is no indication that the rich man's wealth resulted from God's favor. There was displeasure from Father Abraham that the rich man was so unaware of the needs around him. 

No one got hurt

The news anchor talked about a tense episode that ended without incident. She concluded her segment with the sentence "and you will be happy to know that no one got hurt".

Really? Is that what we want? I'm pretty sure that if the news only showed happy stories, few would watch. Why do we slow down for accidents? I think we are looking for that which we don't want to see.

Oh the paradox of our humanity.